The Holy Blood, Henry’s Widow and How Much It Costs to Bury Someone in Stow

An ambitious day for us broke with clear skies and sunshine. Sunday morning in Chipping Norton and we had an abbey, a castle and a handful of cemeteries on the plate. We’d had a bit to drink the night before, so we were a little gauzy around the edges. Eh…we were on vacation. Setting and keeping to an agenda, born from that ambitious tourist’s inner terror of wasting time and missing Stuff To See, felt a little bit at times like we were in a self-regulated militia…but today would be relatively easy, as we were returning to the Rose and Crown that evening.

We headed out on foot and down the street to the church – our second try to have a look at the beautiful St Mary the Virgin. A church has existed here since the seventh century, founded by a wandering Celtic evangelist named Diuma; the existing structure dates largely from the 13^th and 14^th centuries, its nave being rebuilt in the late 15^th century.

The light was harsh and brilliant that morning – both our sets of pictures of the churchyard are a tad heavy on the contrast (we always talk about retouching later on the PC and never really get around to it), 

and being Sunday, inconveniently, the locals were starting to arrive for services. It seemed a little weird (disrespectful?) to be shooting the cemetery while folks were showing up for church, so we tossed off a few quick views of the 18^th century churchyard and headed back to the hotel to get the car keys.

This was the day I had in mind to get a little lost in the Cotswolds. Largely agricultural, with a lengthy history in the wool trade, the Cotswolds now is an archipelago of small, mainly 17^th and 18^th century villages strung together by narrow county roads, dotted here and there with immense, rich-folk country estates. The history is thick around here – plague, witch trials, remains of Roman outposts –the word “charming” comes up a lot on tourist-targeted websites about the Cotswolds.  Every few miles there’d be some too-narrow-for-passing side road heading off into the lush, verdant distance with a modest signpost listing miles to the few hamlets along the way, many which probably counted nor more than a few dozen residents, if that.

Part of me wanted to chuck the itinerary and just crawl down a few of these glorified hedge-maze tracks, to see what we’d see and where we’d come out. The Inner Steves thing again, I suppose, but we really also wanted to visit Hailes Abbey and pick off some cemeteries, and when it came right down to it, we couldn’t reasonably do both. 

Our encounters with absurdly immense (at least relative to road size) agricultural equipment also seemed to peak in the Cotswolds.

Hailes Abbey, built in the mid 13^th century by Henry III’s brother and donated to the Cistercians, was famous for housing a vial of Holy Blood, a crucifixion relic donated to the abbey in 1270, and quickly became a destination for pilgrims seeking miracles, the vial providing a tidy source of income for the Abbey itself. Henry VIII’s commissioners weren’t particularly impressed with relic’s authenticity, however, declaring it a vial of duck’s blood periodically refreshed by its cleric handlers, and the abbey was eventually surrendered as part of the Dissolution in 1539. 

The Abbey grounds are spacious and only a small portion of the building fabric above ground remains – some half curtain walls and arches. 

I found the place pleasant enough, but did feel an inexplicable sense of sadness about it. We shot some pictures – being Sunday, there were quite a number of other visitors to the site – and we headed back to the car. We started to drive off, when we realized that we completely missed the church, so we turned around, parked again and crossed the lane to see Hailes Church. 

And good thing we did, as Hailes Church – older than the Abbey itself – is a humble little gem, dating 

to at least to the mid 12^th century. Tiny and spare, the walls still retain now-ghostly medieval wall paintings added in the 13^th century when the church came under the auspices of the Abbey itself. Covered in wax by the then-landowner in the early twentieth century to protect them (a very bad idea), they were rehabilitated in the early 1970’s. St Christopher and St Margaret of Antioch are among those depicted, as well as depictions of mythic fauna and hunting scenes. 

It is a palpably haunting place, and at least as satisfying as a walk through the Abbey grounds themselves.

The next stop was Sudeley Castle, best known as the residence of Henry VIII’s widow, Katherine Parr (whose name is alternately spelled with a C or a K). 

The castle itself is an impressive property, with a lengthy and complex history only several paragraphs could do ample justice to. It was also one of the few truly historic sites we visited on the entire two week trip that was basically private property, something vaguely triangulated between an immense garden, a country estate, a Tudor-history museum and a castle ruin. The parking area was huge, probably three football fields in size, and there were easily a couple of hundred of cars parked there when we arrived. 

The grounds are a popular family picnic spot, and within the property boundaries lay the gardens and the immense castle itself, some which reveals unrepaired damage (“slighted”, as common historical terminology would have it) inflicted by Cromwell’s forces toward the end of the Nasty Business in the mid 17th century. 

Much of the property is a private residence, though, owned and occupied by two families: Lord and Lady Ashcombe, and Henry and Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and their families. We had to pay the admission out of pocket – our Heritage Pass was of no help here. 

  

After skeletal and primitive abbey ruins and the humble elegance of Hailes Church, though, we found Sudeley a noisy and crowded experience, almost a Tudor theme park, with ice cream and souvenir vendors stationed around the property, kids running around and costumed volunteer guides leading tours. There is a museum in one of the main buildings and we paid the admission price and went in. No photography allowed…which was alright, as the exhibition, featuring clothing, letters and household items from Katherine’s time and thereafter, was short, a little cramped and not very compelling. There is a magnificent church on the grounds, St Mary’s Chapel, where Katherine is buried, and we had it figured for the destination’s last redeeming feature.  But a mock funeral (recreating Katherine’s own of September 1548), complete with a stream of tourist mourners, was being assembled, and the church was closed to all but the procession. We weren’t up for joining it, either. 

It may have been our single biggest destination mistake on the trip – it just wasn’t our thing. To be fair, families with kids, a relatively high tolerance for tourist kitch and a keen interest in vast garden grounds and Tudor history and architecture might find it a swell day out. Maybe on a less crowded day we would have found the zone.

In any event, we managed to kill off most of the day between Hailes and Sudeley, so we shoehorned our way back into the VW and headed back to Chipping Norton. Sharon had the town cemetery at Stow [aka, Stow-on-the-Wold] pegged for inspection, so we pointed the GPS at it and took off.

Stow is one of the larger towns in Cotswolds, the site of an especially bloody battle during the Nasty Business – we had looked at it as a possible base, can’t remember why we chose Chipping Norton instead – and a busy little place, with a few off-camber turns that I managed to have to take three or four times. We spied the church from the main intersection (historic St Edward’s, as it turns out, where they held John Entwistle’s funeral in 2002) but didn’t take the risky-looking detour to go visit. Just another mind-bogglingly historic Grade 1 church we left on the table. I had given up days before fretting about all the old churches we were missing. There are only so many hours in the day.

The city cemetery – like most municipal cemeteries in England – dates to early Victorian, but it was on the main drag and we couldn’t park at the front, so we slid down a side street and – boom – another cemetery, right outside the Baptist church, a block or two away. Bonus. The church was locked, but we walked around the churchyard and shot some pictures, then walked up to hit the town cemetery.

The covered archway to the cemetery’s entrance was an unexpected treat. Under the eaves hung a number of original signs regarding use of and expected behavior toward the burial grounds, as well as …a price list, itemized as to whether the deceased was a parishioner, whether they died in the parish, whether the survivors were erecting a headstone or memorial, etc etc. The fees and schedules were set by the Burial Board in Aug, 1856. 

Another sign promised fines and/or imprisonment for “riotous [sic] or indecent conduct” in the cemetery during burial services (5 pounds and /or two months in the slammer), and yet another governed the depth and width of graves, the thickness of the burial vaults , how much soil needed to be laid upon interred vaults before another vault could be laid atop it (yes, family plots stacked coffins – that whole ‘efficient use of limited space’ thing again), and how long graves had to be left undisturbed before they could be opened again for additional interments. 

One assumes that such explicit regulations were born out of necessity, and it’s tempting to speculate what manner of ghoulish anarchy existed before the Burial Board imposed their rules and regs.

Anyway…the cemetery was pleasant and well-kept, if not especially old, and we headed back to the car, waiting dutifully for us in a ridiculously tight parking space outside the Baptist church. When we walked up to it, I noticed that the right rear tire looked perilously low, almost flat. Sharon remembered that there was a gas station across the main drag (Fosse Way, aka the A429) from the cemetery, although not exactly directly across the road from where we were – time for a dicey little move. We actually walked back up to the intersection to scout it out.  

The service station had a pay-for-air pump, I got some change from the attendant and went out to load some air into the ailing tire. It occurred to me, of course, that not being the owner of a tiny vehicle with Tonka-sized tires, I had no idea what pressure I needed to pump to, so I went back in to ask for a tire gauge. The attendant smiled knowingly at the clueless tourist – no need, he assured me, it’ll just shut off when it hits the right air pressure.

It also occurred to me that – in the States anyway – tire usually lose significant air pressure, in short periods of time, when there’s something wrong with them. Like a leak. And leaks in America don’t usually repair themselves.